Most of what goes wrong on a job goes wrong in the handovers. One firm surveys. Another draws. A third quotes from the drawing. A fitting crew arrives holding a sheet of paper they had no part in writing. Every one of those steps loses something — usually the detail that only made sense standing in the room.
Those handovers do not happen here. Tom had twenty years in the trade before he started the business in 2020. He surveys the job and draws it, and the work is carried out by the team and by the local specialists this business has used for years. Nobody arrives having to be told what was agreed, because they were part of agreeing it.
Survey
The first visit is measuring, not selling.
Rooms get measured wall to wall and then diagonally, because the diagonals are what tell you the corner is not ninety degrees. Floor level is read across the whole run with a laser, not eyeballed at one end. Walls are checked for plumb and for belly. Ceiling height is taken at both ends of a tall run, because in an older house it is rarely the same figure twice.
Then the things that decide what can actually be built. On any job: joist direction and span, where the waste can reach a stack, the stopcock, the gas run, where the consumer unit sits and how far the existing circuits reach.
On building work: what the walls are actually made of, which of them are carrying something, where the roof loads come down, and how much of that can be answered before anything is opened up.
On fitted work: reveal depth at the window so a drawer front is not fouled by the sill, skirting height and profile because a run has to die into it somewhere, and the swing of the door into the room.
And the access route — front door width, the turn at the bottom of the stairs, the half-landing. A tall unit that cannot get past a newel post is a tall unit that has to be made in two pieces, and that is a decision made on survey day rather than on fit day.
Everything is photographed.
Those numbers, off that tape, are the numbers used to cut and to price. They are not handed to another firm to interpret, and nobody re-measures later because the survey was done by the people doing the job.
Design
A drawing here is cutting information, not a picture.
It carries the plan, an elevation for every run, and a section through the worktop and carcass. Door style with stile and rail widths written on. Panel and plinth heights. Scribe allowances marked at the specific wall that leans, with the amount it leans by. Appliance apertures taken from the actual model, in front of us, not from a category. Handle centres. Hinge type and door swing at every position. Drawer box depths checked against the reveal, so the front clears when it opens.
Where something will not work, it gets said at this stage. A run that leaves a forty millimetre filler in the wrong place is better argued about on paper.
A drawing that looks good and cannot be built is a drawing made by somebody who will not have to build it. That is not the arrangement here. It is drawn by the people who will stand in the room with it, so it is honest about the room from the start.
The written quotation follows the drawings, before anything is cut. If the scope changes, it is priced before the change happens, not discovered at the end.
Build
Everything is built to the survey rather than to a standard size — cabinetry cut to the room it is going into, and structural work set out from the building as it actually measures rather than as the drawing supposes.
What that means practically is that a problem gets found before it becomes expensive. A gap discovered on the bench costs a piece of timber. The same gap discovered in the room costs a week, and you are living in the house while it is found.
Fit
Floors get covered and a route in gets protected before anything is carried through, whether what follows is a kitchen coming out or a roof coming off.
The walls are read again against the survey, because plaster and screed move and sometimes a wall has been made good since. Base units go on legs and are levelled across the run to a laser line, not to the floor. Scribes are cut on site, to the wall as it is on the day. Face frames are lined and pinned. Tall units go in against a plumbed line, not against the wall behind them.
If the top is stone, it is templated once the carcasses are in and levelled — which is why the run is set before the top is measured, and why there is a pause in the middle of the job while it is cut.
Doors and drawer fronts are hung last, and the gaps are set last, when everything they sit in has stopped moving.
At the end of each day the site is swept and the route through the house is clear. You are living in the house while we work in it.
Nobody turns up cold. The people on the drive on fit day are the people who have been on the job, and where a specialist trade is needed it is one this business already works with rather than whoever was free that week.
Snagging, and afterwards
Timber moves. A run fitted in August goes through its first heating season in November and something will shift a fraction — a door that catches at one corner, a drawer runner that wants a millimetre, a scribe that has opened where the plaster dried out behind it. That is normal, and it is snagging: going back round the job once the house has had the work in it for a while, adjusting hinges, resetting gaps, touching in paint where a knock has happened.
There is no ticket number for this. The number you call to book the survey is the number you call afterwards, and it reaches Tom: 07469 820977.
